Watering Your Lawn

Keeping your lawn thick, green, and healthy means doing several things right. One of the most important is making sure there’s enough moisture to maintain growth. Nature’s rainfall schedule is not dependable. Some additional watering is almost always necessary, at least during our hot, dry summers.  Lawns turn brown, thin out, and just don’t look good when under water stress. A thin, water-stressed lawn also creates room for weeds to invade. It can be just as bad to over-water compared to not watering at all.  Over-watering can lead to turf disease, along with a shallow root-system leading to poor turf health.  So whether you use underground or portable sprinklers, there are a few basic guidelines to follow to avoid these problems and maintain good lawn health.

Here are some basic guidelines when it comes to properly watering your lawn, and therefore receiving the most benefit from our service.

Water deep, yet infrequently.

Irrigate with enough water to wet the soil to a depth of 6″.  This means setting your sprinker so that it applies about 1/2″ of water with each irriagation.  It varies so much from system to system, so the only way to know for sure is to place a few cans out in the lawn and measure how long it takes to deliver that amount of water.  Don’t water lightly every day, as we see so many homeowners doing.  This only wets the top surface of the soil, watering your weeds more than the turf.  It’s OK to allow the top soil surface to dry out somewhat, as long as there is deep soil moisture available.

Apply about 1.5″ of water per week.

Most turf demands about 1.5″ of water every week to look and perform it’s best.  During hot, dry drought conditions as we experienced in the summer of 2012, that goes up to about 2″ per week.  So, adust your watering schedle to meet the demands.  Sometimes, especially during spring, we recieve more than enough rainfall, so turn your system off.  At other times, we can’t buy rain, so set your sprinkler to come on about 3 times weekly on average.

Irrigate early in the moring.

Try to water very early in the morning before the sun comes up (and before the LawnAmerica guy gets there!).   With this, the water will soak down into the soil, yet the turf blades will dry out as the some comes up.  If you consistently water in the evenings, the turf will stay damp all night, leading to turf disease problems, especially Brown Patch in fescue.

Adjust watering according to soil type, turf type, etc.

Sandy soils absorb water much quicker compared to clay soils.  They also dry out much quicker.  So, you’ll need to water turf in sandier soils more frequently, and for shorter durations.  All lawns have hot spots, along a street or curb for example, which will dry out quicker than areas in the middle of the lawn.  So you’ll need to keep those areas watered more frequently.  This is one of the only times that a little hand watering may be in order.  If your lawn is on a slope, you’ll need to adjust your timing so that excess water does not runoff into the street.  IF you have seeded fescue in the fall, you’ll need to water every day while the seed is germinating.  You’ll also need to irrigate in the winter fi we go several weeks without rainfall.

Our LawnAmerica services are great, but they mainly control two important factors in turf management–fertilility and weed-control.  Watering and mowing are two other cultural practices which are just as important for having a healthy turf.  So we encourage you to do your part in helping us get what we both want–a thick, healthy, green, more weed-free turf.  That’s not going to happen without good soil moisture with proper watering.